A Paris Apartment (2 page)

“The woman,” she said, “the deceased, hadn’t been inside since 1940. No one has. I keep thinking the information must be wrong. Maybe the actual dates were lost in translation and it’s only been shuttered since an ugly divorce sometime in the late nineties.”

April felt herself cringe at the word “divorce” but it was too late. The word was already out. And she’d been so careful to avoid it.

“Seventy years!” she chirped, her voice climbing toward the thirteen-foot ceilings. “Unimaginable!”

“I don’t know,” Troy said and shrugged, betraying nothing with his stern, stone face. “Same thing probably happens in Manhattan all the time. Places stay locked up while estate lawyers and trusts cut automatic checks each month, no one bothering to question a thing.”

“Not if it was anything like this apartment. Evidently it’s crammed to the ceiling with furniture and paintings and basically every item that came into the family’s possession prior to World War II.”

“Anything good?”

“Olivier seems to believe so, or I wouldn’t be going. If nothing else, it’s all fresh to market. Not even the Germans got in there.” April shook her head in amazement. “You’d think at least one errant, gambling-addicted, drugged-up family member would have wanted to get his hands on the stuff somewhere along the way.”

“Unless it’s shit.” Troy picked up his phone and tapped out a message. His formerly smooth brow bunched up. “A Parisian hoarder,” he continued, though he was now most of the way checked out of their conversation.

April sighed.

“Ah, hon, I’m just kidding,” he said, always quick with the necessary retraction, like a reflex. “It sounds very cool. Really.”

The sigh? She hadn’t meant it like that.

“Yes. Cool.” April waved her hand around as if clearing the air. The gesture was haphazard but enough to pull Troy temporarily from his phone.

“Your rings,” he said, staring at her hand and frowning slightly. “They’re in the safe?”

April nodded and looked down at her bare finger. No one wore their good jewelry in Europe, right? This wasn’t about their marriage, it was about her job. Biting her lip, April blinked away the sudden sting in her eyes.

“Troy, listen—” April started, but he was already back to punching at his phone.

Suddenly April’s own phone rang. The car was downstairs. She looked over at her handsome husband and around at their handsome home and thought how happy she had been. For a time her life was bright and shining.
Her
apartment held everything she always wanted. Seventy years? She’d hoped to stay longer. Forever.

“I’ll miss you,” Troy said, appearing at April’s side as she tucked her phone into the leather tote she’d packed for the plane.

As he wrapped her in a hug, his perfectly masculine Troy scent filling every pocket of air around them, April tried to take him in. She tried not to contemplate when or if she’d have this five-senses feel of him again.

Troy gently kissed the top of her head.

“I don’t want you to leave,” he said, sighing loudly. “Maybe you can wait. A few days?”

He sounded so sincere.

“Oh, don’t worry,” April said and pulled away. “I’ll be back soon.”

Chapitre III

April would never forget the smell of that apartment.

Seventy years seemed like nothing once she stepped into the Parisian flat. The stench was closer to one thousand, if smells had age. April inhaled the most negligible of breaths and instantly the taste of dust and perfume filled her eyes, her nose, her mouth. The scratchy sweetness would stay in the back of her throat for months. The sight would stay with her for longer.

The flat was in the Ninth Arrondissement, on the Right Bank, near the Opéra Garnier, the Folies Bergère, and the Pigalle red-light district. This was your colorful Paris, your Paris of writers and artists and filmmakers. April suspected the home had been colorful once, too, before time covered it in dust and neglect.

On the flight across the Atlantic, April relentlessly tore through the material Sotheby’s had compiled for her. The apartment had seven rooms: an antechamber, a drawing room, a dining room, two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen. In the photographs the flat was not large but the opulence apparent: high wood ceilings, pink damask wallpaper, gilded moldings.

But the glossy prints did little to convey the reality. Now, standing in the stifling air, it was overwhelming. All that stuff, rooms and rooms full of stuff. Troy was right, April thought with a smile: This woman was a hoarder. A rich and seemingly flashy hoarder, but a hoarder nonetheless. For the first time in her career April wondered if she had the chops to pull it off.

Walking gingerly through the maze of furniture, April heard voices in the rear of the flat. She was anxious to see Olivier and get up to speed, and while her legs so badly wanted to run, April remained almost on her tiptoes, maneuvering the small footpaths that wound through the seemingly infinite collection of mirrors and armchairs and propped-up artwork, to say nothing of the taxidermied mammals and birds. The mental inventorying started immediately.

Ten cautious steps and five feet later, April spied a Louis XVI gilt-metal bureau plat, a pair of George III mahogany armchairs, a Charles X Savonnerie carpet, and one unbelievable mid-eighteenth-century gold girandole. All gnarled and viney, the piece had a life of its own. It looked as if it wanted to unwind itself and stab someone.

Every turn brought another surprise. Alongside items that would have easily been considered antiques a hundred years ago, April found a six-foot-tall stuffed ostrich and a Mickey Mouse doll slumped in the corner behind it. Spying her colleagues though a cracked doorway, April skipped around a stunning black-and-gold japanned bureau-cabinet and almost bumped into a drab, utilitarian bookshelf piled with papers.

“Ah, Madame Vogt,” said a voice. “Welcome to Paris. You missed the rains.”

April scooted through the door to find Olivier standing with two other men. One fellow she’d seen before in New York at an auction. He worked for Sotheby’s in some capacity, and she remembered his sloppy drunkenness followed by multiple attempts at pawing her assistant. Then again, perhaps April had her Frenchmen confused.

“Bonjour,” she said. “So pleased to see you again, Olivier.”

“Bonjour, Madame Vogt!” said the weaselly Frenchman. “How are things in New York? I’ve been trying to make it back for months.”

Ah, that’s right, she remembered him now. His name was Marc, and he was the one who nearly tackled her assistant, Birdie. April tried to hold back her sneer, politely kissing both cheeks and mumbling the usual French niceties under her breath, hoping her disdain came across as good old-fashioned Parisian aloofness.

Beside Olivier and Marc stood a lanky man with floppy black hair and a lavender dress shirt. April’s eyes could not help but follow the elegant seams of the shirt as it tucked precisely, straightly into pinstriped slacks. She gawked a little at his enviable hips and torso, which jutted forward in such a manner as to convey assertiveness or cockiness or something she couldn’t quite name. April was already starting to redden when she noticed the cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“You can’t smoke in here!” April screeched. The smallest spark could well incinerate the entire flat, anyone could see that. “Out! Put it out!”

The man chortled, dropped his cigarette, and pressed it into the floorboards with a buffed and shiny loafer. Before she had time to reconsider, April crouched and plucked it from the ground. She waved it through the air to ensure full extinguishment.

“You are a dedicated antitobacconist,” the man noted with a smirk as April shuttled the butt into her pocket.

“She’s with us,” Olivier said by way of explanation, or apology. “This is April Vogt. She is our Continental furniture specialist.”

“Ah,” the no-longer-smoking interloper said in his heavy French accent. “L’Américaine.”

“April Vogt.” She extended a hand. He smirked again, nodded, and then pulled her in for a double-kiss salutation. He smelled like expensive cigarettes and even more expensive cologne. April found herself off-kilter from the traditional but unavoidably personal gesture.

“This is Luc Thébault,” Olivier said. “He’s Madame Quatremer’s solicitor.”

“Madame Quatremer?”

“The deceased. This was her apartment.”

“That is not exactly accurate,” Luc said and rested his arm against a chair. April shuddered as she watched the price depreciate beneath his careless, untrained touch. “Technically I represent not Madame Quatremer but the estate. Generally they don’t allow dead people to hire attorneys. In any case, this was her grandmother’s flat. Madame Quatremer resided in Sarlat and never made it up this way, as you might’ve surmised given the condition of the interior.”

“And Monsieur Thébault is the one who called us about the items,” Olivier explained. “For which we are quite grateful.”

“You should be.” Luc turned to April. “You”—he said and scanned her from head to toe— “could almost pass for French. I was not expecting … that.”

April smiled weakly. Years ago, after she managed to snag the curator position at an eighteenth-century Paris furniture museum (now defunct), she read up on how to look Parisian. Or, rather, how not to look quite so American. Dress in smart, dark, tailored items, the literature told her; things easy to put together, to match, to throw on and look as if you’d hardly done anything at all. And that, April thought, was more or less how
she
was thrown together. Straight, dark, and tailored, made entirely of clean lines. The hair, the eyes, the nose: all casually assembled; unobjectionable basic pieces. To stand out all she needed was a jaunty scarf and a Bréton top, which was Impersonating-the-French Rule Number Two.

“No response, Madame Vogt?” Luc said. “Not so garrulous as you should be. I thought these Americans, they jibber-jabber all the time.”

He moved his hand like a quacking duck.

“We choose our words more carefully than most, it seems.” April lifted her chin, then turned. “So, Olivier. It looks like we have a bit of work to do.”

She glanced over his shoulder and spied a Louis-Philippe malachite table butted up against a glorious Louis XVI walnut canapé. Her eyes bugged. The treasures seemed to multiply before her.

“Some of these pieces—they’re unbelievable.” Her voice came out reverential and yet also sad.

April thought of the failed furniture museum and frowned. What if it hadn’t gone under? What if she had stayed in Paris one more month? Two months? She met Troy at Charles de Gaulle on her way out of the city. He took a seat across from her in the Air France lounge, a chance meeting, as she’d never been in a business-class lounge before, much less allowed herself to be chatted up by some random guy in one. At the time April figured if you were leaving town in shame you might as well do it in style. Inexplicably, Troy found her appealing and remained undeterred by this dark-haired woman sucking in tears, trying to let go of the first adult dream she ever had.

“No need to cry over it, Madame Vogt,” Luc said. “It’s only furniture.”

“I wasn’t crying,” she snapped. “And ‘only furniture’? Please! You could fill an entire museum with only the pieces in this room.”

“Never mind the settees and bureaus, Madame Vogt,” Olivier said, snapping his fingers and startling April to attention. He pointed to the spot in front of him. “Do you see this? The painting?”

April made a wide arc around Luc and walked toward Olivier. Before him, against a wall, rested a portrait of a woman. The painting was almost as tall as April, and though the woman herself was in profile she was unquestionably stunning.

Leaning on a mauve daybed, the subject stared away from the portraitist. Her hair was brown, mussed, pulled back so loosely it was really more out than up. Her dress was pink, frothy, and magnificent, whipping around her bottom half like a mermaid’s tail. Despite the grandeur of her gown, the woman’s jewelry was spartan, spare, and her face the very clearest sort of beauty.

“She is gorgeous,” April said, mind still picking through the furniture but eyes fixed on this. “Simply gorgeous.”

“Gorgeous. Yes. But do you see it? Do you see what this is?”

April moved closer and straight into a bath of sunlight.

“Please close the shutters,” she said and futilely held her tote up to the light bursting through the glass. “We need to be careful with the items in here.”

“The lady,” Olivier urged. “Madame Vogt. The painting.”

April stopped. She looked, harder this time, again noticing the woman’s minimal jewelry (a small strand of pearls, one ring for each hand) and also her downright aggressive décolletage. If the painting were a modern-day photograph someone would enlarge it to catch a glimpse of nipple.

Then she saw it. The color. The brushstrokes. The unmistakable
swish
.

“Oh my god,” April said and tucked both hands under her armpits. She wanted to touch the painting. She wanted to touch it badly. It was half the reason she had been drawn to the industry in the first place. There were things she got to put her hands on that the general public did not.

“What do you think of her?” Olivier asked. It was a challenge, not a question. He wanted specifics. He wanted to compare notes.

“Boldini,” she whispered. “I think it’s a Boldini. But that can’t be. Is it?”

“Yes!” Olivier clapped his hands together, nearly singing with satisfaction. He’d found both the portrait and the right person to do the job. He turned to Marc. “See? This is what I told you. You said to me, ‘Non, c’est impossible!’ But Madame Vogt sees it too.”

“I thought she did furniture,” Marc pointed out.

Luc snorted. April shot him an unintentional scowl.

“Yes, well, I know a few other things too,” she said.

Indeed, one did not spend years chasing multiple Art History degrees, or living in Paris for that matter, without the ability to recognize a little Giovanni Boldini. The “Master of Swish” was once the most famous portrait artist in the world. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries you weren’t anyone unless Boldini painted you. This woman was someone.